Facebook reportedly planning to release $200 VR headset in 2018

14 Julio 2017

Oculus, the virtual realitycompany owned by Facebook Inc, is temporarily cutting the price of its hardware, as the industry tries to figure out why the technology for immersive games and stories has not taken off among consumers, Reuters says.

"We don't have a product to unveil at this time, however, we can confirm we're making several significant technology investments in the standalone VR category", Oculus spokesman Alan Cooper was quoted in the Bloomberg report.

Facebook already addressed the first issue by slashing the price of the Oculus Rift and Touch bundle to $399, but according to Bloomberg, it won't be long before it addresses the second issue as well. Let us know in the comments.

The app has a virtual camera that you can position anywhere in your space to capture your VR world, and allows sharing of photos, watching regular and 360-degree videos, sketching using virtual markers, and making video calls.

Inside, we should expect a QualcommSnapdragon processor of some sort, with gaming performance somewhere in the vicinity of the Gear VR - but not the full-blown Rift on the PC. Now, the Pacific headset just might be the device that brings the original pioneers of the VR headset back to the top. It will have no positional tracking, either. One of them is social networking giant Facebook that is spending billions of dollars in the hope of kickstarting VR popularity.

Devices like the Pacific and Santa Cruz are steps in the right direction in tapping the full potential of the VR market. Samsung, with its more affordable devices, controls 22 percent of the VR market. High-end VR devices are clunky and force you to be tethered to an expensive computer, while low-end smartphone-powered devices have poor-quality content.

One more setback for Oculus is the lawsuit in which Oculus was given a $500 million judgment. The pitch is that users, for instance, will be able to pop it on when on a flight and watch movies.